"For instance, despite best intentions, hiring managers tend to favor candidates who fit a particular mold, such as those with similar educational backgrounds or previous experience. This exclusionary process overlooks a wealth of untapped talent..."

The same point was raised in a newspaper interview with the German field marshal Helmuth von Moltke in the 1870s, where he pointed out that both sides in the American Civil War were unwilling to promote to high positions anybody who was not a graduate of the US Military Academy. As fewer than 1 in 1000 of the soldiers were West Point graduates, the US therefore deprived itself of most of its available talent. The French, followed by the Prussians, had abandoned class distinctions some time ago.

In "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," people who went to Old Ivy (Groundhogs) were put on the fast track while Chipmunks from Northern State were, if discovered, fired on the spot.  As shown by this article, this humorous example (and also Sir Joseph Porter's career in HMS Pinafore) tends to reflect reality more than many people would like to think.

"Use additional tools like case studies or problem-solving exercises to better gauge a candidate’s potential and creativity" sounds like an excellent way to discover who can actually perform a job, regardless of paper qualifications. MBA programs already feature case study exercises, and I believe law programs do as well.

How is this article relevant to the current era of DEI and identity-based hiring? This article might make sense if we lived in a well-intentioned meritocracy that could be improved by such nuanced thinking, but we are so far away from that. We need to get back to meritocracy, and we need to do it as soon as possible. 

There are all kinds of mealy-mouthed explanations from proponents of DEI, but the bottom line is that many companies give financial incentives to hiring managers to maintain teams that are less White, less male, and less straight, thereby financially incentivising discrimination against candidates with those characteristics. The outcome has been a total wrench in the meritocracy, whereby the entire society is deprived of the good work that could have been accomplished had hiring managers been empowered to simply choose the candidates they believe to be most likely to comprise a successful team. Yes, there are ways that such Wild West-style meritocracy falls short of the ideal, but I don't think you are going to fix it by defining, dividing, and slicing and dicing things to this extent. 

A hiring manager is responsible for building a successful team and will be held accountable for failing at this task. That's as good an incentive structure as you are going to get. All of these well-intentioned attempts to systemically define and enforce meritocracy will ultimately just be an excuse for moral busybodies to crawl up the rearsides of the people who actually have to make these decisions and live with their consequences. I.e., more excuses for people who pay no price for being wrong to get in the way of those who actually have work to get done.  

It's very silly, I think, to be so far down in the weeds as this article is while completely ignoring the elephant in the room: corporations and universities proudly and stubbornly discriminate against White people (and straight people, and men) in hiring and admissions, and this practice has destroyed the meritocracy with disastrous consequences. Instead of finding some new way to complicate the decisions that people have to make, I think that the busybodies need to just crawl out of everyone's rearsides and let us do our work... they haven't been helping, and the solutions they've foisted on us for the last several decades are destructive and almost certainly illegal (although good luck getting an LLM, or a lawyer for that matter, to admit that financially incentivising discrimination against certain groups is illegal). Maybe sit back and let hiring managers make hiring decisions for once.